Even now, the Feds like to deny it happened. So when people scoff at the idea that radiation causes other people’s dying, I’m skeptical. I met my former client’s last sister before she (like the rest of her family who grew up near TMI) succumbed to her brain tumor. That’s not something you soon forget.

It includes the following:

“The Ukrainian Health Minister claimed in 2006 that more than 2.4 million Ukrainians, including 428,000 children, suffer from health problems related to the catastrophe.”

“A report from the European Committee on Radiation Risk (a body sponsored by the European Green Party) claims that the World Health Organization, together with most other international and national health bodies, has marginalized or ignored, perhaps purposely, the terrible consequences of the Chernobyl fallout to protect the vested interests of the nuclear industry.”

Does the IAEA have a vested interest in the nuclear power industry? Hmmm.

“Estimated” by whom? The tooth fairy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

I quote:

“The 2005 report prepared by the Chernobyl Forum, led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and World Health Organization (WHO), attributed 56 direct deaths (47 accident workers, and nine children with thyroid cancer), and estimated that there may be 4,000 extra cancer cases among the approximately 600,000 most highly exposed and 5,000 among the 6 million living nearby.[4] Although the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and certain limited areas will remain off limits, the majority of affected areas are now considered safe for settlement and economic activity.[5]”

As for TMI, no one (in the goverment or not) has ever been able to attribute even one death to that incident, despite decades of trying. There simply wasn’t enought radition released - you’d get more form spending 2 weeks in Denver.

But don’t let the facts get in the way of your emotional knee-jerks. So much less satisfying that way…

You could say the same of methamphetamine. I don’t like what meth does, either, but it does have strong advocates and stopping it is beyond my control. Sure, nuclear power kills people less often– but when it does, it does so in much larger numbers. The death toll from Chernobyl is estimated at 100,000 (with hundreds of thousands of non-fatal cancers), while the number of deaths conservatively attributed to Three Mile Island is in the hundreds. I once worked for a woman who grew up near Three Mile Island, the last surviving member of her family; her mother and all four of her sisters had died of brain tumors. The government told her it was coincidence.

Our government’s carelessness with radiation exposure is well documented: a look at the National Cancer Institute’s map of fallout exposure resulting from the Nevada Test Site alone(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_fallout_exposure.png) shows that about half the continental U.S. was subjected to excessive radiation as a direct result of the government’s own tests. Says the DHHS, “Any person who was a child under the age of 10 between 1945 and 1962 in the United States and who drank milk should be considered potentially exposed to I-131.” Any child anywhere in the country!

That’s something I never knew until I started researching the story of Utah’s downwinders– and something the government would prefer we not know. It’s this same government we trust to regulate the safety of the nuclear power industry? We’ve got to be crazy.